


By the Way, Your Mother-in-Law Is a Fish Alien

by Nemesis_Adrasteia



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers, Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Crack Pairing, Crack Treated Seriously, Crossover, F/M, Nyotalia, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 09:10:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19664284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemesis_Adrasteia/pseuds/Nemesis_Adrasteia
Summary: An AU wherein Dad Crocker's mother is the Nyotalia version of Prussia, because that would make about as much sense as anything that happens in Homestuck.(Slightly revised version. Written in 2014.)





	By the Way, Your Mother-in-Law Is a Fish Alien

The first rule of being a nation is: Don’t date humans.

The second rule of being a nation is: Don’t fucking date humans. Seriously, dude, don’t do it. It never ends well. 

Since Prussia isn’t a "real” nation anymore, she figures the rule doesn’t apply to her.

She meets John Crocker in the year 1955, while he’s on tour in East Germany. This is a big deal because holy shit, an American comedian on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, how often does _that_ happen? (Answer: Not very often.)

***

“You know I just turned forty-five?” he says, refusing to look her in the eye. “Perhaps you’d rather have someone your own age, not an old fart like me.”

Prussia can’t help herself; she bursts into laughter. In response, John’s frown deepens. He doesn’t get what’s so funny and it’s a damn shame she can’t just _tell_ him, because then it’d be fucking hilarious. She knows better than to try, though. How crazy would she sound if she said that she’s his elder by about six centuries (give or take a few decades)? How can she possibly explain that if she were to settle for “someone her own age” she’d have to choose from a pool of just a couple hundred people, many of whom are her own relatives? What are the odds that he’d still want anything to do with her if he: A) was told the truth, and B) didn’t immediately dismiss her as a delusional wacko? 

Once she’s managed to calm herself down, she pats a very confused John on the shoulder and says, “You needn’t worry about that. I’m older than I look. A _lot_ older.” 

***

A nation being romantically involved with a human is not an easy thing to begin with, so the fact that they’re technically on opposite sides of a war only makes it a little more difficult than it would have been otherwise. It helps that this particular war is more passive-aggressive than the ones directly preceding it (but even so, it’s still a war and therefore a Very Bad Thing).

As it is, Prussia occupies this weird grey area where even though she’s still a nation in spirit she isn’t considered one officially. When she decides to (temporarily) move in with her boyfriend-of-four-years there’s a lot of hemming and hawing and a _lot_ of disapproval from government officials and fellow nations alike, but because the physical place called Prussia technically no longer exists, no one can do anything about it. It’s not that she _wants_ to abandon her people (and she still thinks of them as her people, even if they aren’t on paper); but the situation in her former territory keeps getting worse, nobody really wants her around anyway, and given the choice between: A) having to hang out with that doofus America for a bit, or B) continuing to live in misery under Russia’s thumb...

Yeah, A) definitely seems like the better option right about now.

Besides, she doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. She may be the first to leave home just for a specific human, but she’s not the first to leave home _period_. She knows that Romano stayed with America for a bit around the dawn of the 20th century, at a time when her people were immigrating overseas in droves. She also knows that France has spent a few years living with Canada, and that England’s spent more than a few years at India’s place (much to the exasperation of India). As far as Prussia is concerned, none of them has any right to question her decision. This is, of course, not counting all the nations currently residing in Russia’s house, most of whom were dragged there kicking and screaming, even Little Miss Braginskaya’s beloved big brother Ukraine. (On the other hand, Belarus came willingly. A little too willingly if you ask Prussia. Something about that boy just ain’t right, she thinks.)

It’s only temporary, she keeps telling anyone who’ll listen. It’s just until John gets tired of her, or until he kicks the bucket. Humans don’t live that long, and as he frequently reminds her, he’s already getting on in years.

“I’ll be back someday West, I swear,” she says to her sister while they’re sitting on a bench in the airport, waiting for the plane that will take Prussia across the ocean to the land of bald eagles, giant sandwiches, and a young lady named Amelia with an infectious grin and a fondness of scandalously short skirts.

“Sure you will,” Germany says, rolling her eyes. 

“No, really! I give you my word, I _will_ return, sure as the sky is blue and sure as Austria is prissy. Maybe once they’ve torn down that wall.”

Germany laughs. This comes as a shock to both her and Prussia, since neither of them has been doing much laughing lately. 

“Like _that’s_ going to happen.”

***

Q: What’s the difference between an insane bespectacled woman with a gun, and Amelia F. Jones?

A: One is an insane bespectacled woman with a gun, and the other is Amelia F. Jones.

When Prussia steps off the plane, she is greeted by America (no surprise there) and a person who can only be John’s sister. That is, she can’t not be a relation of some sort; she’s got the same buck teeth, messy hair, goofy facial expressions, and aura of total dorkitude. 

On the other hand, she’s also holding a rifle that’s nearly as tall as she is. That balances things out a little.

“John’s sorry he couldn’t make it!” Jade English says after she’s released Prussia from a suffocating bear hug. “The poor lad is busy appeasing the witch – he stupidly put off telling her you were coming here until yesterday. He certainly is lucky I happened to be in town this week!”

Prussia blinks in confusion. “Witch? What witch?”

Jade’s smile fades away and is replaced with a troubled expression.

“Oh,” she says softly. “He didn’t tell you about her.” 

“Who?” 

“Our mother.”

***

There’s an old joke about how if you rearrange the letters in mother-in-law you get Hitler Woman. Prussia usually finds such jokes tasteless as fuck, but in this case she thinks the comparison might be apt. From the second she meets the creature called Betty Crocker, Prussia knows deep in her gut that there is something very, very wrong with her. As time goes on, she becomes more and more sure of this.

On the surface, Betty appears to be a kind, generous person who loves her children (and perhaps deep down she truly does love them in her own way), but the more time you spend around her the more you start to notice _things_. It could just be the standard distrust and paranoia that come with being introduced to a significant other’s parents (something nations seldom have to deal with), but Prussia likes to think she’s pretty perceptive when it comes to discerning people’s true natures. At least, more perceptive than her closest relations – she doesn’t think Germany and Austria would immediately recognize a real wacko even if said wacko were to introduce him or herself by smacking them in the face with a bloodied severed limb. Betty isn’t quite worthy of being called a wacko, but there’s something _off_ about her. It’s not something that can be explained in words; it’s more of a “you know it when you see it” sort of thing. Years in the future, but not many, a roboticist named Masahiro Mori will coin a term that perfectly suits John Crocker’s dear old mum: uncanny valley.

***

“More tea?” Betty asks, motioning to the steaming kettle with a smile as fake as the faux-leather jacket Prussia is currently wearing (shut up, it was on sale).

“No thank you,” she says, grimacing.

Betty gives one of her little laughs, the kind that would sound pleasant and jovial if it weren’t for the hint of mockery lurking around the edges. “Suit yourself.”

She turns on her heel and sashays out of the room, leaving the mingled scents of expensive perfume and sea-salt behind her.

That’s Betty Crocker in a nutshell. She’s fabulous to a fault and she’s unnerving as fuck; she smells of the sea and her motions are oddly fluid, like someone who’s used to spending a lot of time underwater. At first Prussia thought that she must have been an athlete in her youth, but although she’s clearly in good shape, she doesn’t have the physique of a swimmer. 

Correction: she doesn’t have the physique of a _human_ swimmer.

There’s no getting around it; there is something downright otherworldly about this old lady.

Prussia is reminded of stories about sirens, women who were fair of face, but had bird’s feet and cold black eyes; deceptively lovely monsters singing sweet melodies to lure sailors to their doom on jagged sea rocks. She wonders if something like that happened to Betty’s late husband. Colonel Sassacre must have been either insane or a fool to have loved such a woman. 

***

Come the 70s they’re still together, despite everyone Prussia knows constantly telling her they shouldn’t be. (Her standard response to any criticism of her choice of significant other is, “It’s none of your business, so fuck off!” accompanied by a scowl that could make mountains shudder. She’s had centuries of practice to perfect it.) They have an unspoken agreement where Prussia doesn’t ask questions about John’s mother as long as John doesn’t comment on how neither Prussia nor any of her family or friends seem to be aging at all.

In the summer of 1972 she starts waking up every morning with the urgent need to rush to the toilet and puke her guts out. It doesn’t take her long to figure out why this is.

Theoretically, there has always been the possibility that nations were capable of getting knocked up, but for a number of reasons no one ever put that theory to the test. Prussia is now a pioneer, boldly going where no anthropomorphic personification has gone before (and for some reason she keeps getting cravings for Oreo cookies).

***

“John Crocker Jr.,” John suggests when it comes time to argue over names.

Prussia resists the urge to slap him across the head. He may be her current favourite human in the whole world, but he can be so _dumb_ sometimes. 

“No. No. Fuck no.”

“What’s wrong with John Crocker Jr.?” 

“It’s stupid, that’s what’s wrong with it. No spawn of mine is going to be a _juniour_.”

“Alright, let’s see you come up with something better!” John huffs.

Prussia looks upward and taps her chin, pretending to be deep in thought even though she already knows exactly what she wants to call her progeny.

“I’m thinking Friedrich,” she says after about a minute has passed.

They compromise. The kid can be named Friedrich as long as she swears she’ll always call him Fred in public. 

***

When the boy who is thankfully not named John Crocker Jr. turns one year old, he receives a fascinating piece of newfangled technology that Crockercorp has been working on. Betty calls it a tiaratop. The kid won’t be able to use it until he’s older, but it’s still a pretty cool gift. Or so it seems.

Prussia decides to give it a test run (on a stray cat; she’s not stupid enough to put the thing on her own head) and is not surprised by what she finds. Disgusted? Yes. Disturbed? Double yes. Furious? Definitely. But surprised? Not one fucking bit. 

A few days later, Betty Crocker gets a package in the mail. When she opens it she finds the smashed remains of the tiaratop along with a note elegantly handwritten on a piece of aged, yellowing parchment.

 _“Stay away from my son, bitch.”_

***

Fred Crocker does not turn out very much like either of his parents. Instead, he is a bizarre living patchwork quilt made from the protagonists of about a dozen cheesy American sitcoms. He has his mother’s neat freak tendencies and his father’s fondness of stupid practical jokes, but otherwise his habits are as strange and alien to the both of them as a baboon would be to a polar bear. Fifty years ago if someone had told Prussia she was capable of producing such a child she would have first laughed, then punched them in the face.

On the eve of the last Saturday before he turns thirteen and officially enters teenagehood, Fred approaches Prussia with a determined look in his eye and says solemnly, “Mother, I would like a shaving kit for my birthday.”

It takes her a moment to realize he is not joking at all. What a weird kid.

***

The year Fred turns sixteen is the same year that blasted wall comes down and Prussia is finally allowed to have untimed, unrestricted interaction with her unwillingly estranged sister (thank you David Hasselhoff, and a hearty fuck you to Little Miss Braginskaya). It is also the year John meets a girl named Rose Lalonde.

This is when things start going to shit. 

***

“So let me get this straight,” Prussia hisses through gritted teeth, utilizing every ounce of her self-restraint to not strangle the scrawny, blonde, purple-dress-wearing, teenage whelp in front of her. “You’re telling me that my boyfriend’s mother is going to take over the world, and that I’m going to have a granddaughter who’s destined to bring about the apocalypse, and not only is there absolutely nothing I or anyone else can do to stop this from happening, but the four of you are actually doing everything you can to _help_ with the setting-my-granddaughter-up-to-destroy-the-world part.”

“That’s a rather simplistic summation, but it is for the most part correct,” says Lalonde. She sounds _bored_. Stuck-up little snit.

Prussia glares at John and Jade. “And you two are seriously going along with this bullshit?”

John looks incredibly apologetic but doesn’t say anything. Jade just shrugs. 

Strider, who has been keeping quiet for the most of the conversation, chooses this moment to pipe up.

“Come on Lalonde, cut the cryptic seer crap and work your mind-warp mumbo jumbo on Miss Ex-Country already.”

It takes a second for those words to sink in, and before Prussia has a chance to say, “Wait, what the fuck? How did you know?” Lalonde decides to take advantage of how she’s standing there frozen with shock and swoops down on her like a bat, pressing the tips of her fingers to Prussia’s forehead.

Prussia is about to swat Lalonde’s arm away and resume shouting at her and her accomplices, but then Lalonde looks her straight in the eye and speaks a single word in a dark whisper full to the brim of the _understanding_ of one who has gazed into the abyss without flinching; one whose mind may almost be able to comprehend the distance of the spaces between stars and the vastness of infinity.

**“Remember.”**

And then she knows, somehow she _knows_ that in another world, a world that no longer exists, a boy who looked almost like Fred (but not quite) was born to a woman who looked almost like her future granddaughter (but not quite) and a man who may or may not have been (but probably was) a different version of Prussia herself. The thought of it makes her feel ill, because she now knows that the version of her that exists in _this_ world will someday think of that girl/woman – _Jane_ – as her granddaughter, and the very idea that some other version of her might have been her granddaughter’s husband/boyfriend/friend-with-benefits/whatever... no, she will not think about that. It’s so, so wrong in so, so many ways. Even after Lalonde has got through explaining the ectobiology stuff she doesn’t feel any better about the situation; it just adds another layer of wrongness, because it is literally a crime against nature on multiple levels.

Everything is so, so very fucked up.

***

She doesn’t cry at John’s funeral. She kind of wants to, kind of thinks she ought to, but she doesn’t. The day he died was weird in that it was simultaneously a day on which something Very Bad happened and a day on which something Very Good happened. Lose a boyfriend, gain a granddaughter; everything balances out. It’s still sad in that way that death generally is. 

“I hate this,” she says to her sister while she tosses a bunch of flowers onto the empty grave. (It’s empty because Colonel Sassacre’s family has a tradition of stuffing and mounting the deceased. It’s fucking weird, but Prussia doesn’t question it. She’s seen weirder.)

“I really fucking hate this. Death, I mean. It sucks. Not cool at all.”

“It’s your own fault. This is what you get for dating a human,” her sister replies.

“Oh, so it was okay when you had that little fling with Hasselhoff?”

“That was different!”

“Suuuuure it was.”

She’s right, though. It _was_ different. There’s infatuation, and then there’s love; totally not the same thing. She’s not going to let West know that it was actual honest-to-god love, though. Can’t have people thinking she’s a sap. 

***

Jane Crocker doesn’t have many clear memories of her grandmother. Among the few she does have, however, there is one especially vivid memory from when she was nine years old. 

As she grew older Jane gradually became aware that there was something wrong with her grandmother, though if asked she would not have been able to articulate exactly _what_ was wrong.

If John Crocker had lived to see Jane enter her ninth year of existence he would have been ninety-five years old, yet Julchen Beilschmidt didn’t look a day over twenty-five. Jane knew this was strange, but she did not understand _why_ it was strange.

“What’s the matter, kid? God Cat got your tongue?” asked the woman who by all rights should have been elderly, but inexplicably was not.

Jane shook her head and handed her grandmother the picture she drew with her brand new Crockercorp crayons. It depicted a small humanoid creature that looked somewhat like a lizard and somewhat like a skeleton happily tearing into a hunk of raw meat. Scattered on the floor around the creature were swirly lollypops and colourful rectangles that might have been either cereal boxes or video game consoles.

For a moment Jane’s grandmother just stared at the picture with an unreadable expression before she said, “That’s very creative.” 

“I saw her in my dreams,” said Jane. “She’s an alien.”

“She’s cute, in a terrifying green skull monster sort of way.”

That was the last time Jane saw her grandmother.

Years in the future, but not many, when she asks her father whatever happened to Nanna Julchen, he smiles sadly and says, “I have no idea where she’s gone off to, but I’m sure if she ever wants to be found you’ll be the first to find her.”

*** 

They’ve gone into hiding, mostly. There are gatherings of the remaining nations sometimes, just for the sake of proving to each other that they’re still alive and kicking. Occasionally Prussia accompanies America on her periodic visits to the last two humans on Earth: the lone human girl adrift in a sea of cats and carapaces, and the lone human boy who dwells on a steel island with his robots and his little horse. Other than that, nothing. 

Well, almost nothing.

As much as Prussia loathes the batterwitch, she does not ignore the invitations when they come. She’d love so very much to tear them to pieces and throw them in the trash, but for some reason she never does.

Hence why she is now sitting on a couch in one of the last intact, non-submerged mansions on the planet, having tea with a grey-skinned, improbably gorgeous woman with horns on her head and the blood of millions on her pretty hands. The Condesce stopped bothering with her human disguise a long, long time ago. Prussia would be lying if she said she wasn’t impressed by how well she concealed her true appearance. Like a god from one of the old myths. There’s a story where Semele, one of Zeus’s many lovers, insisted that Zeus appear before her in his full glory. Unfortunately, Semele’s puny mortal eyes couldn’t handle viewing the full extent of a god’s magnificence, and so she spontaneously combusted. Perhaps, Prussia thinks, this was the ultimate fate of Colonel Sassacre.

“You won’t win,” she says suddenly, after several minutes of awkward silence punctuated by the ticking of the grandfather clock behind them. “My Jane and her little buddies are gonna kick you and your boss’s skanky alien asses to Hell and back.” 

The Condesce puts down her teacup and gives Prussia an amused, sharp-toothed sneer.

“ _Your_ Jane? That’s kinda overstating your relationship to her, don’t you think? You barely know the kid. In another world, I raised her.”

“Yes. In another world. Tell me, fish-girl, what’s it like knowing you’ve lost everything you ever gave a shit about twice over, and that it’s all about to happen again and there’s nothing you can do to stop it?”

The witch’s eyes narrow and her lip quivers, and Prussia’s mind barely has time to process those facts before The Tyrant Formerly Known As Betty Crocker reaches across the coffee table and slaps her.

Prussia isn’t angry, not even a little bit. She’s not angry because: A) she thinks that if she were in the Condesce’s position, she’d react the same way to hearing something like that, and B) now that all of Lalonde’s other predictions have come true, she knows for sure that the Condesce’s downfall is just a matter of time. Prussia may be a jerk even at her best, but she can’t bring herself to be angry with someone whose shit is so utterly, thoroughly wrecked.

If anything, she feels sorry for the witch. Not that she’d ever say so out loud.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if she’s angry or not. She is not some common wench who will passively accept a blow, even one that comes from the mother of her departed paramour; she is _Prussia_ , once among the most formidable military powers on the face of the Earth, and still strong and sharp as ever after all these years. Such an insult to her dignity simply cannot be ignored, let alone forgiven. Grinning maniacally, Prussia slowly, gracefully rises from her spot on the couch and draws her sword from its scabbard.

“Shall we strife, Betty dear?”


End file.
